Justice for Men and Boys - Isn't this exactly why we need feminism

[wickeddevil]

Heard Justice for Men and Boys Founder Mike Buccanan on Womens Hour earlier today complaining that men pay 72% of all income tax.
Well isn't that because they have more income?

And instead of complaining about the feminist agenda doesn't it demonstrate why we need it?

Yes, maybe you are right.
I'm not a psychologist, but I have always thought of violence as being directed at others not at oneself. I tend to think that self-harm is not the same thing as violence, due to the direction of the act.

Is a woman who takes an overdose of sleeping pills being violent?

Yes, I think it is a form of violence - self-directed violence, just as I think self-harm of any sort is a form of violence.

Certainly there are links between interpersonal violent behaviour and suicide with substance abusers being a particularly high risk group. www.psychiatrictimes.com/suicide/content/article/10168/1780669

'The tendency to engage in violent behavior is a potentially important risk factor for suicide in substance abusers. Up to 75% of those who begin addiction treatment report having engaged in violent behavior (eg, physical assault, mugging, attacking others with a weapon).20,21 Emerging research also indicates that violence may partially account for the connection between substance abuse and suicide risk. For example, in those seeking treatment for substance use disorders, the perception that they have difficulty in controlling their own violent behavior was associated with a greater likelihood of a prior suicide attempt'

I don't agree with this. I think the people are more violent due to the substrance abuse and not because of anything to do with the risk of suicide.

I think the classification of suicide as violent reclassifies human behaviour and relations and possibly was originally introduced for a political purpose - a possibly progressive purpose. Maybe one that blames the victim rather than the substance which is used in the "substance abuse".

I am against the progressive policy of legalising drugs and substances than can alter the minds and behaviours of people. I believe that quite often the violence and even suicide and hopelessness and despair is a product of these substances and not of any intrinsic propensity to violence within human beings themselves.

'just as I think self-harm of any sort is a form of violence'

Do you then think that anorexia is violence?

I don't, I think it is an illness and I think the depression and hopelessness and despair that can lead to suicide is also often an illness or mental ilnnes and is not violence. I think that treating these things as violence risks diminishing and even blaming the victim and has potential dangers about how people are viewed by the people who treat them.

I think that treating the death of a person who jumps off a building in complete hopelessness and despair as an act of violence is the act of a system that views people as numbers, that sees an injury as being the result of violence rather than understanding what led to that injury.

I think it is an example of progressive thinking and can only be formed by an extrenal observer of human psychology which feels little empathy with the victim. That is why I think it is potentially dangerous in that it treats people as statistics and their desths as incidents of "violence" when I feel that they were no such things, but were instead figures of "desperation".

The Daily Mail reports today on a man who had a PhD in physics and who could only find work in a call centre and who jumped off a building to his death.

I think it diminishes him and his death and teh deaths of thousands of suicide victims to call his act an act of "violence". It may lead to the real problems and situations that lead to people taking their lives being misunderstood and not dealt with by a system of external observers in white coats in laboratories with stethoscopes viewing peoples' suicides as being acts of "violence".

I think language matters because it shapes opinions. That is why I against political spin and misclassification of human behaviour by any system that fails to empathise with the victim.

Suicide has always been thought of as violent, as self-murder, only in the past few decades has it ceased to be a crime in England (up until the 60s people were imprisoned for attempted suicides) yet we still use the phrase to 'commit suicide' exactly like a murder.

That's a good question claig - yes I suppose I do think it is a form of violence against oneself. I agree with you that it is an illness.

I think you may be seeing my use of the term violence as a value judgement. It isn't. It is more an observation of the extent of the hurt and the pain and the lengths that people will be pushed to when they are in distress.

I think looking at self-directed harm in terms of violence against oneself is important in order to try to help people.

I have a friend who used to work with suicidal/self-harming teenagers - she used to get very frustrated with a lack of recognition of the anger they felt (most of them didn't express it as anger against others but as violence against themselves).

'Suicide has always been thought of as violent'

'up until the 60s people were imprisoned for attempted suicides'

But doesn't that indicate how ridiculous that old system was.

After a person jumped from a building and after the emergency services saved their lives, were they then handcuffed and sent to prison for commiting a violent act?

Ok x posts with you claig.

I see you do think my use of the word violence is intended to diminish/victim blame. It really isn't - it is just trying to look at an issue head on and try to understand it. I don't use violent to mean bad - indeed I don't use it to mean anything other than violent.

'I think you may be seeing my use of the term violence as a value judgement'

Beachcomber, I don't blame you or anyone for thinking what they do, because I believe the "system" has spread this view and has influenced all of our opinions. I believe it has even influenced some of the people in the white coats, and I think that the system is political and fosters a view of "correctness", a "political correctness" that suits the system and not the people and vulnerable suicide victims.

I think
"up until the 60s people were imprisoned for attempted suicides"

was wrong and injust and incorrect and I am glad that we changed this view politically so that no longer do such injustices happen.

I think some vestiges of that old-fashioned view as the victim being a violent perpetrator may still exist by terming suicide a "violent" act.

Yes they were, actually, with gunshot wounds and so on. It must have been terrible and I'm glad it has been decriminalised (not assisted suicide of course).

I'm not completely convinced by the romantic notion of all suicides flowing from the desperation and loneliness of untreated depression or other mental illness. People kill themselves for many reasons, sometimes out of spite or vengeance but I think as with any other seemingly senseless taking of life it is more comfortable for us to think 'they must have been ill to do that' and of course it's not always the case.

To be clear Claig, throwing ones self off a building is not a violent but throwing someone else is?

' I don't use violent to mean bad - indeed I don't use it to mean anything other than violent.'

You see I think violent is bad, and that is why it is bad to call suicide violent, since it diminishes the victims who are suffering from an illness.

The politically correct redefinition of bad to good is what Orwell warned us about in political systems whose slogans were "freedom is slavery, war is peace and ignorance is strength".

I don't like "suicide is violence" it is too close to Orwell for my liking, and it rislks viewing human behaviour through the wrong end of a prism or stethoscope.

'To be clear Claig, throwing ones self off a building is not a violent but throwing someone else is?'

Yes, I think so.

OK claig - I guess we are seeing violence as being different things.

I see suicide as a violent act that a human is driven to. The reasons behind what drove a person to that act of violence will be immensely varied.

I don't see violence as automatically 'bad'. It depends on the context. For example self-defence/protecting ones loved ones can take violent forms but I don't think that is bad.

That's interesting. Is it an act of violence if someone who is mentally ill throws another human being off the building, under the delusion that they are saving them from a worse fate? Or if someone who is not mentally ill throws themselves off the building to punish their parents or spouse?

Good point, violence as a form of self-defence is not bad and is in fact justifiable and good.

But I think that there are dangers in viewing suicides as violent.

You said

'I think male violence is immensely important too in this issue that's all.'

I don't think the man who jumped from the building was a violent man.
I think that viewing suicide as violent can have politically correct consequences such as viewing male suicides as often being a result of "male violence" and therefore treating it as a problem of male violence, with the solution being one of changing and contrrolling "male violence", possibly by drugs or similar treatments. But this is wrong because the man who jumped from the building was not violent, so this approach does not serve to treat or solve the real problems but serves to politically treat suicide as a problem of "violence" which does not benefit victims but benefits the system.

'Is it an act of violence if someone who is mentally ill throws another human being off the building, under the delusion that they are saving them from a worse fate?'

What fate could be worse? But yes, it was an act of violence committed on another person. However, what judgement is made on that act of violence depends on the state of mind an intention of the perpetrator.

The culpability of the peretrator depends on their state of mind.

By classifying suicide and self-harm and possibly even anorexia as "violence", it expannds the definition of violence thus encompassing many more people with the result that their illnesses and tragedies will inevitably in some way be seen as a cause of their inherent "violence" and often "male violence". That way the victim will be viewed less sympathetically and their suffering will be minimised and downplayed.

But what it also does is to have the corrosive effect of minimising real violence, real violent acts and real "male violence", with teh potential danger of beginning to see these as a form of illness instaed of the vicious violent acts that they are.

Both of these politically correct consequences will lead to harm to society and people and will eventually benefit an Orwellian control system.

I disagree claig. I think we need to shine a light on violence (of all forms) in our society.

A person who self-harms has often been subjected to some form of violence (physical or psychological) and they are reacting to that with their own form of violence. I don't say this to diminish or be unsympathetic - quite the contrary, it is to appreciate the gravity of the person's situation.

And, if you like, my level of sympathy depends on who the victim of the perpetrator's violence is.

My sympathy is reserved for the victims.

'I think we need to shine a light on violence (of all forms) in our society'

I agree with that. We disagree about what is violence.

I think we need to focus on real violence and not blur the boundaries and create confusion by treating suicide or anorexia as violence, because if we do that then we run the risk of losing our resolve to combat violence and we risk losing public confidence and certainty in what is an isn't violence.

I am a conservative and not a progressive, I believe that language and taboos exist for a reason. We mustn't diminish the force of our language or our taboos, because if we do we risk losing the force of those words and ideas and risk a weakening of our resolve to combat real violence and injustice.

Blurring the boundary between illness and violence and vice versa has many dangers for society.

We read about the progressive consequences of treating some violent, sexual and criminal acts as a form of illness that can be treated by psychiatrists in prisons, daily in our newspapers. We read of people who have been "treated" in prison and who are said to be "rehabilitated" and who are released from prison and go on to perform the same violent and sexual crimes and assaults.

Having thought about this further, I would like to make one further analogy with that endless source of hypocrisy, pomposity and amusement known as New Labour.

I don't think that violence is necessarily the same as causing harm and is not in my mind the same as causing self-harm.

I do not think that a woman who overdosed on sleeping pills was being violent, however I do think she committed self-harm.

Where New Labour are concerned, I believe that they harmed the country but I do not think that they were violent, although many people have said that they gave us all a good kicking before they left.